I purchased a sales book this week, as much for the cool free stuff I was getting as for the book itself. Now before I go on a bit of a rant – please remember that I’m still thrilled to get the free stuff, but not as thrilled as I was by the IDEA of getting free stuff.
I started at 6:00 a.m. going through it all – different places for the downloads, through different registration processes….. at 7:47 a.m. I gave up and decided I would come back later to finish. Almost TWO HOURS and I hadn’t finished.
Here is my list of what didn’t work for me, along with my commentary:
4 – The list was overwhelming, so much “free stuff”.
- I completely understand that everyone who contributed to the book (tips & tricks from lots of different sales experts) wanted to capture my contact info and to me that is completely acceptable – I get free stuff & you get to market to me.
Some way to make the process easier – a “global registration” where I agree that by saying I want all the free stuff and it uploaded my contact info to everyone.
Most of them had the double response where I had to agree to be registered as well – so this would give me the opportunity to confirm I really wanted to register.
3 – eBook format – why not a .pdf?
- A few of the eBook offers linked me to a web page with an article on it (remember, I am downloading lots of different things from different contributors at this point). What are the chances I’m reading it all right now – ZERO, I’m downloading to read later, can’t do that with a URL so now I am out of your life, no feeling of free on these. I just bailed without ever reading the content – might have been fantastic, I’ll never know.
2 – Landing pages as commercials vs. informative.
- I had a couple favorite landing pages that gave me a brief understanding of what I would get by registering and a flavor of the way content would be delivered. LOVE IT! There were more that had the feeling of an infomercial at 2:00am, I have already decided to go to a page where I know I’m registering, stop “selling me” and start informing me of how the experience will be after I register.
Some of these convinced me – not purposely – to NOT register as I didn’t want to get eZines that had that feel to them as well.
….. and my number one pet peeve for this experience is (drum roll please):
1 -Don’t ask me for my credit card information to give me free stuff! Really are you kidding in this age of identity theft? You offer me a “free trial membership” and want my credit card.
- Perhaps, thinking it through – if the offer was “buy 2 months get 1 free” then I would have gone into the process knowing you would need payment.
I know, I know – how does this apply to you?
4 – Don’t overwhelm your prospects with “stuff”, if you give away so much the value of your product (in this case the book) is diminished in the prospects eyes.
3 – What you give away needs to be easy for the prospect to use.
2 – Once the prospect has bought in, shut up. Many sales are lost because the salesperson keeps talking because they never noticed they had made the sale.
and…..
1 – If the prospect doesn’t believe it is free – it isn’t.
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